Program:

Involving local communities in conservation at Area de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Background | Purpose | Actions and Results

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Program Partners and Personnel

Our partner in Costa Rica is the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (ACG/GDFCF), the international NGO for Area de Conservación Guanacaste.

Key people for this project are: Drs. Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs of the University of Pennsylvania, Sigifredo Marin (on-site coordinator and director for GDFCF projects at ACG), and Maria Marta Chavarria for the small program for children's education in marine biology and conservation.

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Background

Area de Conservación Guanacaste

Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) protects 163,000 hectares of stunning tropical forest and marine habitat in northwestern Costa Rica, making up two percent of Costa Rica's entire area. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, evolving from a small 10,000 ha national park in 1971 to one of the world's most successful habitat restoration and conservation efforts. ACG's structure is decentralized, with certain sections being publically owned, and other sections privately owned or held by NGOs — all dedicated to conservation. Our partner, the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, owns 13,500 ha making up "Sector del Oro", "Sector Mundo Nuevo" and "Sector Rincon Rain Forest".

ACG protects mainly dry lowland forest, which is especially endangered habitat in the tropics because it is accessed relatively easily for logging. ACG also includes adjacent areas of ecologically interlinked rain forest and cloud forest found at high elevations atop three volcanoes. Its marine sector stretches 6 km into the Pacific Ocean, protecting 43,000 ha of marine habitat.

The 350,000 species of plants and animals living in ACG equal in number 2/3 of all those in North America, representing 2.6 percent of biodiversity on the planet. ACG supports research at the leading edge of ecology, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, biodevelopment, child education, and conservation. Our partner Dan Janzen comments:

Much of the forest within ACG had been previously cleared, and the work of Janzen and colleagues demonstrates how landscape-scale forest regeneration can succeed in the tropics. The area is protected from the threats of burning, ranching, logging, hunting, fishing, development and the conversion to agriculture that has consumed surrounding areas.

Parataxonomists

The approach at ACG also shows the benefits of employing local people to manage a conservation area, with over 130 staff made up entirely of Costa Ricans, the majority from communities surrounding ACG. One celebrated innovation has been the training of "parataxonomists": transforming the traditional position of park patrol officer to create more intellectually stimulating and meaningful involvement in conservation management. In addition to patrolling and guarding the park, parataxonomists are responsible for the identification and collection of species for biodiversity inventories and contribute to strategic planning.

Dan Janzen pioneered the concept of "parataxonomist" in the late 1980s:

Creating local employment shifts the economic incentive away from resource extraction, while building awareness and support for conservation in the community. Dan Janzen notes that this objective stands in contrast to the classical method of "declare the area a national park and engage in decades of cops-and-robbers interactions with the dying and resentful town on its margin". ACG's approach costs less money, requires a very different interaction with local communities, and has a much better outcome.

Community education

In 1986 the nascent ACG realized that the most effective long-term conservation solution for the emerging ACG, aside from buying land and stopping hunting/burning/logging, was to simply teach basic biology and ecology in the field, in ACG, to all 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students in all schools ringing ACG — as far out as budget would allow. Today, this involves about 2,500 students per year in 50+ schools and accounts for about 20% of the ACG budget. There are 11 full-time teachers, two school buses and a complex (and computerized) scheduling system to ensure that (1) no one is left out, (2) no student does the same field trip twice, and (3) the students regularly do field projects in ecosystems different from the one in which they live (coastal students go to the rain forest, rain forest students go to dry forest, etc.).

While the PEB program has worked extremely well for this rural area, the small fishing town of Cuajiniquil is a special case, requiring substantially more attention per student and per family. This is because Cuajiniquil is was based on the practice of artesanal fishing selling to the market of San Jose, and because a major fishing ground for them was the marine area decreed a national park (no take area) in 1970 and 1977, and then a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. This necessitated a staged cessation of fishing activity coupled with support for alternate means of income generation. The process was also being forced on the village by their own steady depletion of the resource both inside the national park and for a very large marine area outside of it. Hence the desirability of the after-school program in Cuajiniquil that ICFC supports.

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Purpose

ICFC is involved in two projects at Area de Conservación Guanacaste:

• training and support for five parataxonomist positions;
• marine and coastal biology classes, field trips and field courses for the children of Cuajiniquil, a fishing village neighbouring ACG.

These activities are crucial to the broader purposes of effectively managing ACG for conservation, building data and knowledge about ACG's biodiversity and ecology, and generating local employment and community backing.

After supporting the parataxonomist program on an annual basis for several years, ICFC is changing tack with the creation of an endowment fund to secure four or five parataxonomist positions in perpetuity. ICFC has committed to raising $600,000 as an initial contribution to the fund.

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Actions and Results

Parataxonomist training

ACG currently has eleven biological field stations with twenty-nine full-time parataxonomists, of whom five are trainees supported by ICFC. The group also includes several senior mentors who have been with ACG for many years, trained by Drs. D. H. Janzen and W. Hallwachs in courses from 1989-1992.

Key activities are as follows:

1. Five parataxonomist trainees were selected from the surrounding community, based on interest in biology and willingness to learn the new skills required for the position;
2. Each trainee was paired with an experienced mentor and placed in one of five field stations (Estacion Quica, Estacion Leiva, Estacion Botarrama, Estacion Llanura and Estacion Caribe), all of which are located in remote parts of the northern rain forest (70-400 m elevation). View map of field stations.
3. Work schedules were developed at each station to include the collection of biological specimens, rearing caterpillars, entering records in a computer database, patrolling the sectors, and liaising with neighbours in the vicinity regarding land use issues. The group of parataxonomists convenes regularly and meets with a supervisor to assess progress.
4. Parataxonomists contribute to a major DNA barcoding project carried out in partnership with the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph. They prepare specimens which are sent to the lab in Guelph where DNA is sequenced, and information is sent back for parataxonomists to compare with their observations.
5. The specimens and data are shared internationally with museums and taxonomic specialists, as well as the Costa Rican Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio); Drs. Janzen and Hallwachs provide feedback electronically and visit each field station at least once annually.

As a result of these efforts, ACG has a growing biological inventory and scientific database. More than 5,000 species of insects and 1,000 species of plants have been identified and collected within ACG, revealing some extremely rare and un-described species. For example, as collections extend into higher elevations, parataxonomists are finding new species of caterpillar and species that have appeared in only a few records over the past two centuries.

Between January and June 2011 alone, parataxonomists completed 6500 records of caterpillar rearing. This process involves: finding and identifying caterpillars of a particular species; collecting specimens along with correct food plants; documentation in photos; monitoring and care through pupa and adult butterfly stages; analysis of butterfly characteristics for taxonomic identification; tracking information in a database; and preparing samples for DNA barcoding.

Training parataxonomists in DNA barcoding has been a major success. More than 200,000 samples have been sequenced so far, with hundreds of new species discovered in the process. The most recent focus is on creating a thorough inventory of plant viruses within ACG. The effort has demonstrated how individuals with very little formal education can develop expert knowledge of sophisticated biological techniques through experiential learning.

In addition, surveillance and protection — essential for any protected area — is accomplished for ACG by parataxonomists, and there are a growing number of people in local communities who are knowledgeable about nature and support conservation.

Biological and conservation education in the ACG area

This aspect of the program provides conservation education at the community level for children from the town of Cuajiniquil, on the coast just north of ACG. Maria Marta Chavarria leads the program, working as a volunteer in her spare time. She is a gifted science teacher who began as a parataxonmist in the early 1980s, and is now a biologist and subdirector for ACG marine affairs. ICFC support allows the purchase of supplies and food, which are the essential logistic backbone of the program.

Key activities include:

• After-school and weekend classes in marine biology and ecology are held at a sea-side school-room (La Casita) at Cuajiniquil. This includes talks on requested themes, video presentations of documentaries, and short field trips with swimming lessons, bird observations, and bike tours.
• Boat outings allow each child an opportunity to study marine life by snorkeling, after learning about fish identification and natural history. Building from this experience, a group of students is gearing up to participate in the 2012 Great Annual Fish Count, an event to inventory fish species in a sample of marine areas. In August, viewing humpback whales is an additional goal and usually at least one mother and baby whale are observed.
• Two-day camping trips are offered for groups of 12-14 children or 10-12 teenagers, who are selected based on written applications. Students have the chance to walk and swim as they observe forest, beach and river ecosystems. They prepare small research projects in groups, comparing their observations to reference books.

The course emphasizes self-reliance, as students do all their own cooking and other caretaking. It also advances the written and oral communication skills needed to explain scientific observations, and develops students' understanding of ecological processes (competition, carrying capacity, mutualism, predator-prey relationships, taxonomy, natural history life cycles, etc.).

The children in turn teach their parents, resulting in several requests from adults who wish to learn more, and parents have been invited to accompany children on various outings. La Casita has also become an important resource for the wider community, with people stopping by to chat about conservation, report sightings of birds and animals, and do research at the library, which is accumulating information documented by the students.

Education coupled with patrolling by ACG marine staff is resulting in a steady decline in human impact on ACG's marine ecosystem. It is hoped that within five years the impact will be reduced to the occasional case of poaching or other transgression, allowing the marine sector to restore itself. As a small yet telling example, the star young teenage student in Chavarria's current course is the daughter of the primary commercial (illegal) deer hunter and fisherman in Cuajiniquil.

Fish study. Beach cleanup. Bird watching.

Photos: Maria Marta Chavarria (ACG/GDFCF) Working on a tree guide. Camping. Learning bird identification.

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